A wireless ad hoc network (an example illustrated in FIG. 1) is a collection of nodes that communicate by forming a multi-hop radio network without the need of a infrastructure. Nodes in an ad hoc network forward information (e.g., frames) to other nodes by selecting one of the available routes to the destination node based on several parameters, such as link quality, round trip time, etc. Generally ad hoc nodes do not have a fixed topology, but ad hoc networks can be fixed and perform multi-hopping. Nodes can join the ad hoc network and leave dynamically, and the ad hoc networks can vary in the degree of mobility. The ad hoc network heals itself by selecting alternate routes to the destination node, and each node in an ad hoc network can be viewed as a router. The dynamic formation of ad hoc networks, the ability to setup a network anywhere without the need of infrastructure, and the self healing characteristic make the ad hoc network very necessary for situations, such as public safety incident scenes, where infrastructure connectivity (e.g., access points) might not be available.
In the case of an incident scene, wireless ad-hoc networks allow public safety agencies to communicate without the dependence on an infrastructure. One of the problems with using a wireless ad hoc network, for example at an incident scene, is the ability to prevent information from hopping (i.e., being routed) through a single bottleneck node. Nodes which are not part of a communication dialog between another set of nodes may become a bottleneck node and may have little or no bandwidth available to make any emergency calls for itself; the bottleneck node in such a case ends up forwarding information for other nodes. Although the advantage of ad hoc networks is for information to hop through any available node, this does pose a serious problem in a large, dense ad hoc network.
Thus, there exists a need for minimizing the likelihood of a node becoming a bottleneck node and forwarding information for other nodes.